Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Meet you in the parking lot. Whose car?”

  I said hers would be fine. The Skyliner leaked where the Plexiglas insert met the steel roof and my seats were squishy. We hung up.

  Last year’s Hudson Hornet, gunmetal gray with whitewalls and fender skirts that made it resemble a garden slug, glided to a swaying stop alongside me while I was waiting on the pavement by the employee entrance. The driver leaned over and cranked the window on the passenger’s side. Round spectacle lenses caught the light, looking like blank cutouts under the brim of his hat. “Minor?”

  I said I was. He straightened, popped open the door on his side, and came around the front of the car, heels snapping on asphalt. I’m a long way from tall, but I could have looked straight down at the crown of his hat without straining. The hat, a white Panama, was broad enough to keep the drizzling rain off his suit, a tight gray three-piece with the jacket buttoned. The narrow body under the wide brim reminded me of a mushroom. It might have been stunted in the shade.

  “J. W. Pierpont.” He stuck out a white hand. It was a perfect miniature, right down to the fingernails. “I’m taking you to lunch.”

  “Sorry. I already have an appointment.”

  “This one won’t wait.”

  I started to grin; officious little pricks have always affected me that way. Behind me a leather sole scraped concrete and I turned, expecting Janet. The two men standing with their backs to the entrance were easy to miss, like the Penobscot Building when you were looking for it and suddenly realized you were standing right in front of it. The one in dirty white overalls looked like Broderick Crawford. His companion, wearing a suit coat over a corduroy shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie and green work pants, looked like something that had fallen off the back of a truck. His face and hands were as black as cast iron. They dressed out around two-fifty apiece.

  J. W. Pierpont withdrew his hand unshaken. “I borrowed these fellows from Albert Brock; the steelhaulers union, you know? Just window dressing in case I ran into an argument. Actually they wouldn’t step on a bug. Walter’s impatient. Things can’t move fast enough for him since the overpass, you know?”

  “Walter?”

  “Well, Reuther. He’s anxious to meet you. You know? So let’s skeedaddle.”

  10

  J. W. PIERPONT WAS THE WORST driver I ever rode with. He blasted aside obstacles with his horn, changed lanes without warning or reason, and had no sense of timing at all when it came to traffic signals. I lost count of the times he failed to anticipate the red and braked in the middle of an intersection, forcing the cross traffic to fishtail past the Hudson like water around a snag, enraged horns Dopplering all the way down the block. I should have known what was in store when I climbed into the passenger’s side in front and noticed that all the leather panic straps hanging from the headliner were broken.

  His attention to simple automobile maintenance was no improvement over his driving. All the indicators on the dash lay all the way over to the right and he had no shock absorbers. The body swayed and bounced on its springs like the Overland stage. Within a dozen blocks I had mal de mer and mohair under my fingernails from the fat handle inside the door. There was a blue haze in the car from an exhaust leak under the floorboards. Barring a collision, I was a goner to asphyxiation for sure.

  If I didn’t know just how hard it is to drive badly on purpose, I’d have suspected pernicious design. I was kept too busy hanging on to my life and my breakfast to ask where we were going.

  Wherever it was, it lay to the northwest. There the wartime concrete bunkers with common walls between the apartments and businesses that occupied them thinned out and were replaced by streets of new houses with picture windows, power-clipped lawns, and shrubs shaped like bunches of broccoli, so close to the architects’ visions that any one of them could be photographed and superimposed on the original sketch with nary a line out of place. Only the odd tricycle in the front yard or basketball hoop mounted over the garage door broke the uniform pattern of row upon row of long ground-hugging brick and aluminum-cased ranch-styles laid end to end like pipe. But the surgical process by which this new way of living was delivered from the old was caesarean, and anything but antiseptic. Here and there the neat lines were spoiled by mounds of raw earth with grubby yellow bulldozers crawling over them like ants, clearing lots for new foundations. Muddy runoff from the eyesores etched brown tributaries in the emerald sod next door and oozed down the gutters in front.

  At length Pierpont swung into a paved driveway exactly like its neighbors on both sides and stood on his brakes to avoid rear-ending a two-year-old Chevy Bel-Air parked in front of the garage. When the Hudson stopped rocking I pried my fingers off the dash and got out. Terra firma hadn’t felt so good since I rode the car ferry across the Straits of Mackinac in the middle of a November storm. That time I’d at least had confidence in the pilot.

  Of course the house was a ranch-style, with steps leading up from the trough of the driveway to a brief porch of unfinished cement. A picture window the size of a neighborhood movie screen was blanked out by drapes the color of washed-out gold. I’d never seen one covered before. Generally they seemed to exist as much for the casual passerby to glean an idea of the owners’ daily routines as for the owners to see out; which made sense, the view of the opposite side of the street being the same from each side.

  “Who’s his landlord?” I asked Pierpont. “William J. Levitt?”

  “What’d you expect, the Manooghian Mansion? Walter’s a working stiff.” The little man squashed the bell with his thumb. The Kong twins remained behind in the car.

  Between the bing and the bong, the door swung inside, framing a Negro as big as a davenport. He had on a plaid sport coat and twill trousers that stopped two inches short of his black steel-toed high-tops, exposing a pair of white athletic socks. I figured he had an aversion to mud puddles. He was completely hairless and his head reminded me of a medicine ball. It was that big, for one thing, and for another a series of perfectly vertical stitches started at the crown and came down like seams to the thick mantel of bone that hung over his eyes. I couldn’t think of any object that would cause an injury like that, so I decided he had had it done according to some fashion I wasn’t aware of. Miss one issue of Esquire and you’re behind the whole season.

  The socks were the tip-off. They were an integral part of the unofficial uniform worn by union employees from New York’s garment district to the avocado farms of southern California. There was a rigidity about the practice that approached fanaticism. I wanted to show him my expired press union card, but I was afraid he’d eat it.

  His eyes, invisible and without luster in the shadow of their bone carapace, were something you took on faith, like the presence of a big cat in the darkness of its den at the zoo. I sensed when they shifted from me to Pierpont. At that point he shuffled aside, allowing electric light to leak out onto the porch for the first time. As he moved, his coat opened briefly and I saw the checked grip of an automatic pistol with thick rubber bands wound around it to prevent it from sliding down inside his pants.

  Pierpont placed a palm against my back, gently but with pressure. I walked around the Negro’s big stomach and descended two steps into a sunken living room carpeted wall to wall in the same gold as the drapes in the window. Imitation wood paneling covered the walls and a lot of furniture upholstered in green with glittering gold threads stood around on thin steel legs trying to look as if it were floating eight inches above the floor. The most expensive thing in the room was a combination TV and hi-fi phonograph in a pickled wood cabinet the size of a coffin. Family pictures and a bowling trophy stood on top of it. The room was spotless, and illuminated entirely by indirect lights in the ceiling and a Christmas-tree floor lamp in a corner. All the windows were covered.

  A medium-built light-haired woman with sad eyes appeared inside an arch on the other side of the room while the big guard was patting me down for weapons. She wore a blue apron over a sweater and s
lacks and kneaded a checked dish towel in her hands.

  “It’s Jake, May,” Pierpont said. “Walter’s expecting.”

  She turned and left with a snap that said everything I needed to know about her opinion of the little man in the big hat. I never saw Mrs. Reuther again, and I’m told it’s my loss. She was a fixture on every UAW picket line since the wedding, handing out fat ham sandwiches and pouring steaming coffee from an army of Thermoses. They say her first reaction after a shotgun charge obliterated a window in her kitchen in the spring of 1948 was to throw her arms around her severely wounded husband.

  When nothing more lethal than three sticks of Beechnut gum turned up on my person, the Negro stepped away and I accompanied Pierpont around a blind corner, down another flight of steps, and into a basement room. Here a low ceiling textured like cottage cheese swallowed all sound, deadening even the sharp clatter of billiard balls colliding on blue felt.

  This room was the darkest yet. Even the welled windows near the ceiling had been painted over, leaving only a yellow circle on the pool table from a Tiffany-shaded fixture suspended from a chain above it. The man in white shirtsleeves pursuing the balls with a short cue was invisible from the neck up until he leaned down for a difficult bank shot. Then the light caught a pair of slightly puffed eyes under pale brows, a nothing sort of a nose, full lips curved like a woman’s, and cheeks shaped like parentheses. In a couple of years they would be full-fledged jowls, and if his metabolism went to hell as thoroughly as mine had he would be Winston Churchill by the end of the decade.

  It wasn’t a face you’d remember on short acquaintance, but the intentness in the eyes as he lined up the shot was familiar enough from newsreels and the papers. Ten years older than Henry Ford II, Walter Reuther, national president of the United Auto Workers and Ford’s frequent adversary at negotiation talks, looked and acted five years younger. There was an electric energy in his step as he moved around the table that seemed beyond the powers of the bearlike Boy King at any age.

  And he was a good pool player, skinning the three-ball past the eight on a two-cushion shot to sink it in the corner. I was just bad enough at the game to appreciate the shot, because he made it look easy. What I couldn’t figure out, as he paused to chalk his cue, was the presence of a child’s flesh-colored rubber ball slightly bigger than a walnut balanced on the end of the table. It looked like a hatchling belonging to one of the ivories on the felt.

  The squeaking of the chalk was the loudest sound in the room. Pierpont stood in the gloom with his fingers curled at his sides, waiting for Reuther to speak, and I was aware of the silent looming attendance of the huge guard behind us in the shallow hallway at the base of the stairs. There was something imperial about that waiting quiet, but given the remoteness of that subterranean room with its painted windows in that anonymous neighborhood it was less like Versailles than St. Helena. I had heard that since the attempt at assassination this Man of the Common Worker had become more difficult to get close to than Farouk in his golden exile; so far everything seemed consistent with the rumor.

  After what I would have called an inordinate amount of chalking, the player blew across the top of the cue, and I swear I heard the particles falling to the carpet. They made a faint sizzling noise, like new snow settling on green grass. Then a furnace kicked in somewhere close with a click and a rush, and the throne room atmosphere drifted away on the stench of fuel-oil and suburban survival.

  Reuther appeared to notice the difference, and something like annoyance rippled under his incipient bulldog features. It came out in his tone. “If your head’s cold, Jerry, I can tell May to crank up the thermostat.”

  Pierpont swept off his Panama. “Sorry, Walter. I forget I have it on, you know?” He looked older without it. His hair, white on the sides and greasy black on top, lay flat on his scalp with alleys of pink skin showing through, and his ears stuck out like car doors. His head, as was the way with men who wore hats most of the time, looked naked and almost obscene. Looking at it I remembered the night I was driving with Agnes on Jefferson when a souped-up Model A coupe pulled alongside and a teenage boy hung his pimply bare ass out the window on the passenger’s side. My reaction was the same now as then.

  The pool player arranged an almost impossible combination on the table and plunked the eleven-ball in the opposite side pocket without taking more than a second to aim. Then he threaded the stick into the wall rack and came around to our side, scooping the rubber ball off the rail on the way.

  “This is Minor?”

  “This is him. Didn’t I say I’d get him?” Pierpont’s voice cracked with pride. It was a high thin pioneer twang of a sort I hadn’t heard in a long time; that was dying out with his generation.

  Reuther stopped in front of me. He was shorter than I’d expected, although taller than either Pierpont or myself, and slight. Union people especially photographed large. As he looked me up and down he squeezed the ball rhythmically in his right hand. “Who’s paying you?”

  I turned the question over like the foreign coin it was. “Ford.”

  “You admit it?”

  “I said it.”

  “You don’t look the part. I guess that’s the idea.” He squeezed the ball once, twice. “Funny, I thought Sonny was more subtle than the old man. Back in thirty-seven it took us months to spot the spies.”

  The word surprised me so much I laughed in his face. That was a mistake. The skin of his forehead darkened suddenly, the muscles in his jaw stood out like rivets. I thought for a second the rubber ball would explode in his fist.

  He held fast. The storm receded. He spoke quietly. “I didn’t ask you here to entertain you. How long have you been spying for Ford?”

  “Who says I’m a spy?”

  Squeeze, squeeze. What had begun as therapy for the shoulder chewed up by the shotgun blast had become a fixation. If the muscles hadn’t recovered by now they never would.

  He changed his tack. “Do you shoot pool?”

  “I tried a few times. I was banned from the billiard room at the Press Club after I tore my third felt.”

  “It isn’t like life. Each ball has its own number and color. You can tell them apart. When I joined labor I thought it was us and them, the suits on one side and the coveralls on the other. One of my best friends on the line at River Rouge gave Harry Bennett a list with my name on it. The only time I ever saw him in a coat and tie was at his funeral.”

  “Natural causes, I hope.”

  Squeeze, squeeze. “I learned from the experience. I have people in Personnel at Ford. The files there have you down as a public relations consultant hired by Israel Zed. I find that fetchingly vague. When you don’t know what a man’s duties are it’s hard to tell when he’s doing something he shouldn’t be. I do have to wonder why a Glass House executive has been spending so much time on the floor at Rouge.”

  “Glass House?”

  “The new building on American has more windows than the rest of Dearborn put together. May I see your hands? No, the other side. I’m not going to rap your knuckles.” His eyes flicked over my palms. “What has a man with so few calluses in common with a foundry foreman? Or a quality control worker in the assembly plant? Or any of the other dozen or more people you’ve been pestering with questions from the docks on the river to the sixteenth hour?”

  “If you talked to them you know the questions I’ve been asking are all about the operation, not about them or their fellow employees. What does a spy care how the doors are hung on a Fairlane?”

  “What does a PR man care?” He stopped squeezing the ball. “My sources aren’t all employed in factories. You were a newspaper reporter. Reporters are paid to gather information. What’s Zed planning to do with the information you’ve been gathering at Rouge?”

  “Zed wouldn’t know what to do with it if I gave it to him. I’m gathering it for myself.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I let out air. For the first time since Pierpont trotted out the walking artill
ery at Schaeffer I wasn’t afraid for my skin. It’s difficult to be nervous in the presence of a man who’s more nervous than you or anyone else you ever met. “If you know I was a reporter you know that was twenty years ago. I’m a pitchman. Zed hired me to pitch the E-car. All I knew about cars going in is who to take them to when they stop working. This is homework. Selling the car is the first real chance I’ve had to make good since I left newspapering. It helps to know what you’re selling.”

  He rolled the ball over in his palm, pushing it with his thumb. Agnes and I had gone to see The Caine Mutiny at the Roxy over Christmas and I thought of Bogart’s Captain Queeg and his steel ball bearings. “What’s your drink? Jerry.”

  Pierpont scuttled behind a midget bar in the room’s gloomiest corner, paneled in knotty pine to match the walls. A light came on above it, striping a row of bottles on the Formica top. He placed his hat on an unoccupied section.

  “No alcohol,” I said. “I’m on a special diet.”

  “Diabetic, right?”

  I knew a sharp pang of distress. “I didn’t know it showed.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to look for if it did. I said I have sources. Club soda, Jerry. Scotch for me, neat.” Reuther looked down, saw what he was doing with the ball, colored a little, and put it in his pocket; I guessed he’d seen the same movie. He was wearing loose slacks and penny loafers. In the extra light I saw that his button-down Oxford shirt was pale blue, not white. He made a lot of appearances on television, which banned white for its effect on camera lenses. The gentleman’s conservative white shirt shaped up to be the next casualty of the cathode tube.

  I wasn’t thinking about shirts right then, however. Something in my host’s new manner told me I was about to be confided in by the man who ran the most powerful labor union in the most powerful country in the world.

  11

  “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN shot, Minor?”

  Reuther and I were both holding glasses now. J. W. Pierpont, having switched off the bar light, had returned to his original place, hat in hand. I had already decided the headpiece served the same purpose for him as the rubber ball did for his employer.